Since the election of Donald Trump, the media has been obsessed with Russia, Russia, Russia. One of the things we always hear about Russia is that it is a so-called “managed democracy.” There are elections, are there are political parties, and you aren’t going to get arrested if you condemn the leader, but there are so many obstacles to opposing parties organizing, Vladimir Putin is effectively in power forever.

This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have genuine support, but it does mean he’s taking advantage of an unequal playing field. And besides institutional advantages, one of the most important benefits President Putin enjoys is control of the media. It’s not that there isn’t opposition media, but they effectively don’t matter, as they are frozen out of the mainstream.

Some mainstream conservatives are opposing this at least rhetorically. A huge number of conservative groups recently signed a letter asking for four principles to be incorporated in the policy of social media networks, including:

Provide Transparency

Provide Clarity on “Hate Speech”

Provide Equal Footing For Conservatives

Mirror The First Amendment

I also note with pleasure these groups specifically condemned the practice of working with, “dishonest groups that are actively opposed to the conservative movement, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.” [Conservatives Urge Fairer Social Media Policies, Newsbusters, May 1, 2018].

This alone is a huge sign of progress. The fact that the SPLC has lost credibility among many conservative organizations is a huge victory in and of itself. Of course, it is a limited victory. Nobody in this coalition, for example, asked VDARE.com to sign. Nor do we think that they would object if Facebook or Google took measures to bury our content. But perhaps we will be proven wrong.

Speaking of Google, a number of immigration patriot groups, including us, are finding our pages delisted when it comes to search engines. Obviously, this has a dramatic negative effect on traffic. But more importantly, it has a dramatic effect on the kind of traffic we get.

VDARE.com has published decades of material on certain perennial issues in the immigration movement. Now, it is far more difficult for new readers to find us, or for people researching specific questions to find answers to those questions. Instead, they will simply receive the same Open Borders propaganda they would get from the likes of MSNBC or CNN.

Ultimately, this has huge electoral consequences. Raising money, running ads, and sending direct mail don’t matter compared to spontaneous efforts on social networking and people sending each other articles online. Now, of course, it will be far more difficult for people to do this. While the mainstream conservative movement may survive for a while, and may even benefit in the short term, it ultimately can’t survive losing its entire right flank. Yet they don’t seem to see this. When presented with attacks by powerful corporations on their own constituents, Conservatism Inc. doesn’t even see the problem. Instead, they just cut the taxes of their enemies.

Donald Trump’s most passionate supporters, after all, were populists and nationalists who came outside of the established conservative movement. They were motivated by a huge number of disparate issues, but above all, they were motivated by immigration. The Republican Party is essentially letting the tech companies drain the power of its own grassroots.

In other words, there will be an opposition to the liberal establishment, but it will be powerless, marginalized, banished to the fringe. America, in short, will be just another managed, or controlled, democracy. Perhaps it already is.